Responding to Unspeakable Horror

No work of literature can begin to address the trauma that Haitians are currently experiencing in the wake of their devastating earthquake. But then, literature can never do justice to human tragedy. In the face of such inexpressible suffering, the poet gropes around in the dark, occasionally making utterances that some, in their agony, find consoling.

The French philosophe Voltaire captures our feelings of meaninglessness in his satire Candide, which was in part a response to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, tsunami, and resulting fires that leveled the city.

Before the earthquake, Voltaire had been inspired by the discoveries of science (especially Newton’s) and by the notion that the universe was run by a benign God. In this deistic vision, God was seen as having given us Reason so that we could penetrate the mysteries of life and perceive a higher order working its way through apparent chaos.

Voltaire’s views were shaken by the earthquake. He would go on to mock his former position through the character of Pangloss, who insists, despite a series of catastrophic events, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Or as Alexander Pope expresses it in Essay on Man, “whatever is, is right.”

Instead of viewing this optimism as a wisdom that sees beyond tragedy, Voltaire exposes it as a blinkered dogmatism and, perhaps, a form of psychological denial.

I do not believe we can find higher meaning in the Haitian earthquake, even though we may go searching for it. It confronts us as an auto wreck confronts Karl Shapiro in his poem by that name:

But this invites the occult mind,
Cancels our physics with a sneer,
And spatters all we knew of denouement
Across the expedient and wicked stones.

Confronted with the horror, Shapiro is saying, the superstitious mind reaches for occult explanation.  That’s because rational or scientific explanation seems absurd.  In fact the mind, confronted with the final unraveling, arrives at the conclusion that life is meaningless.  We cannot make sense of what has happened.  All lies splattered; the stones, pure materiality, have triumphed. In Haiti these stones lie piled above the dead and dying.

But if we cannot find higher meaning in the earthquake, if we cannot understand why people suffer, we can at least assert meaning by reaching out to them. Those gestures of aid are God in the world. We must each do what we can to help.

Update:  Here’s an instance of the “occult mind” at work: Pat Robertson blaming the earthquake on a Haitian “deal with the devil.” Faced with horror and suffering in the world, some people will go just about anywhere for explanation.